Southward of Moab came other tribes which, like the Ishmaelites, were said to have sprung directly from Abraham himself. These were the Midianites and the merchant tribes of Sheba and Dedan, who possessed stations on the great desert road that led from the spice-bearing regions of Southern Arabia to the borders of Canaan. They claimed to be the descendants of Keturah, or ‘Incence,’ the second wife of the Hebrew patriarch, after Sarah’s death. Another genealogy (Gen. x. 7) placed Sheba and Dedan in the extreme south of the Arabian peninsula, among the children of Cush. Both genealogies, however, are correct. Sheba was the kingdom of the Sabæans, whose centre was in Southern Arabia, but whose power and commerce extended far to the north. Their trading settlements and garrisons were to be found in the immediate neighbourhood of Midian, at Tema, the modern Teimah, and elsewhere.[60] If Professor Hommel is right in identifying Dedan with Tidanum, one of the names by which Palestine was known in early days to the natives of Babylonia, it would seem that the Dedanites also had become a leading people on the frontiers of Canaan. At all events, it is clear that Abraham was claimed as an ancestor by the tribes of Western Arabia from its northern to its southern extremity, by the descendants of Keturah on the western coast and caravan-road, as well as by the Ishmaelites further to the east. They represented the trading and more cultured population of the peninsula as opposed to the wild Amalekites or Bedâwin hordes, who had their home among the mountains of Seir and the desert south of Palestine. The connection between Midian and Israel, which found expression in a common ancestry, was reasserted in later days when the great legislator of Israel fled to Midian and married the daughter of its high-priest.